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Pacific's Soup of Garbage an Environmental Travesty
In 1997 former sailor Charles Moore decided to take a shortcut in a yacht race from Los Angeles to Hawaii. His vessel entered into an area known as the “North pacific Gyre,” a place rarely traveled by sailors on account of its slow ocean currents and infrequent winds. The Gyre yielded much more than slow winds. For a solid week Moore sailed through a "plastic soup" of garbage, now known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the Trash Vortex. The refuse stretches from 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, past Hawaii and reaches almost to Japan. It is twice the size of the continental US. 100 million tons of garbage is estimated to be caught in the swirling currents of the vortex, the world’s largest garbage dump. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by. How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?" Moore said in an interview. After selling his business interests, Moore became an environmental activist. He warns that the area the garbage covers will double in size over the next decade if consumers do not cut back use of disposable plastics. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who has tracked plastic in the oceans for over 15 years, says the effects are dramatic when the floating soup of garbage reaches land. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic." The majority of the waste makes its way to the soup from land, but one fifth of the garbage is actually thrown off ships and oil platforms directly into the ocean. Tony Andrady, a chemist working for the Research Triangle Institute said "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere." Modern plastics are so durable that they do not degrade naturally, causing the mass of plastic to continually grow. In 2006 the UN Environment Programme estimated there was 46,000 pieces of floating plastic in every square mile of ocean. Plastic makes up approximately 90 percent of all ocean garbage. The UN Environment Programme also reported that plastic waste results in more than a million seabirds, and 100,000 marine mammal deaths every year. Birds mistaking the garbage for food have been known to have everything from cigarette lighters to syringes found in their stomachs. Tiny plastic pellets used in the plastic industry act as ‘chemical sponges’ soaking in pesticides and other man made chemicals, hundred of millions of them are lost or spilled every year. The pellets are ingested by marine animals with the potential of ending up in the food you eat. This continent sized mass of garbage is a shameful reminder of the wastefulness of our race. While the floating soup of garbage disgusts me, it is our lifestyle that disgusts me more. The more we take from the Earth in order to ‘better our lives’ the more we must ensure the safety of our planet. I am even more disgusted that this is no mere accident. Our waste is knowingly thrown into the ocean with no thought to the consequences; one fifth of it is simply heaved over the side of ships and oil rigs. It is a travesty, and we will pay for it in time. No matter what foolishness mankind engages in, no matter how much we abuse this planet, Mother Nature will win out in the end. Humans account for only a sliver of time in the history of this planet. When we have succeeded at last in extinguishing ourselves, nature will carry on, the scars of our time here slowly erased. If we continue to blatantly disregard the health of our planet, this is a sure fire future for us all. Earth can subsist easily enough without the human race, the reverse however, is far from reality. |
The Independent
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This intel was contributed by The Rift
The Rift
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May, 2012
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